Hello, amazing people! I am trying to submit the patterns to Shutterstock. It said in the instructions that the pattern fills need to be expanded. I don't use Illustrator and I wonder what would it mean for CorelDraw and what would be the corresponding/analogous or equivalent commands in Corel Draw to create the same result? Does it mean the patterns repeat itself when a customer will change the shape of the image or color etc.? Does someone work with Shutterstock and uses CorelDraw? Thank you very much in advance!
Here is how it works in Illustrator:
Expand Pattern Fills (ref: www.shutterstock.com/.../6-tips-to-follow-when-submitting-vectors-for-the-first-time)
All elements of vectors must be accessible so that customers can easily edit the files. Not all customers are using more recent versions of software that provide the ability to edit a pattern fill. For that reason, we require all pattern fills to be expanded.
Pattern fills can be included in your EPS file, as long as the the actual vector pattern in the EPS is expanded.
To expand a pattern fill in Adobe Illustrator:
Select the shape that contains the fillOn the menu bar go to Object > ExpandA dialogue box will pop upMake sure that “Fill” is checkedYour pattern fill is expanded!
I finally found this article about it from Adobe. That's clarifying the question: Group and expand objects
Stroke = Outline, Path = Curve, so I can use some other tools available in Corel to make a pattern look like this, I think.
For example, there is no outline or a contour for a curve but it can be done with Artistic brush and then breaking it apart.
The problem is that CorelDraw should have provided an official way to expand it's patterns. When Corel first implemented this feature, the first thing I tried to do was expand the pattern as that is a requirement for the work I do. But I'm primarily an Illustrator user so it's not a big deal for me. But I see that a workaround was discovered where you could just save the file as an Illustrator file then reimport it back into CorelDraw. The art apparently gets expanded as a byproduct. Maybe you should look into that. I think someone mentioned that above. Keep in mind that you might need to trim or crop the art once you get it back into CorelDraw. I'm not sure since I haven't do it, but when I get art from some of those sites, I'm always dismayed to find that the art has been cropped, making it far less flexible/useable. I personally would want it to be merely masked, (powerclipped) but it seems that the file sharing sites are asking users to crop the art.
This may be a little offtopic but i believe may be handy for people who use both Draw and Illustrator. I found out by accident that if you create a pattern fill in illustrator, fill any shape with this pattern and export from illustrator to pdf (native illustrator settings will do) and then import or open pdf in Corel Draw, vector pattern fill is preserved (unlike when importing or opening ai file). Once opened in Draw, you're able to save desired vector pattern to your corel fills library. I find Draw's way of creating pattern fills rather tedious and inconvinient that's why i use this method a lot.
There's also another way of "expanding" pattern fill. You need to use THIS FREE MACRO. It was originally designed to "expand" postscript fills but works with vector pattern fills, powerclips and even "expands" corel created barcodes. One warning though: when expanded, all elements are in RGB and manually need to be converted to CMYK, also original shape is there (no fill, no outline) so it needs to be ungrouped and deleted if neccessary. I started using this macro around X4 and it still works fine in GS2018.
Thanks for sharing.
For what it's worth, that macro exports the current selection to .AI, then imports the .AI file.
This one didn't work.
I import the .IA and the curves are not converted.
I was looking for this result which I now know how to do: Select outline - Object - Convert Outline to Object or Ctrl+Shift+Q